I have this sneaking suspicion that I may have picked a terrible week to do a scrutiny. The reason for this suspicion is that ultimately, that what I’m looking at is not any shots from a film in their own context but a remix of these images used for different rhetorical purposes. So, at the risk of bending the rules of the assignment description a bit I’m going to engage in a brief generic exercise and then talk about the outlier in the bunch, the videos of Catherine Grant.

There seem to be three genres of video in this weeks set of viewings. They are the essayic, the observational, and Catherine Grant.

The Essayic

Essayic videos tend to work as what is effectively a supped up version of a traditional academic essay. The author develops a thesis, as in the case of de Fren’s argument that the fembot in a red-dress is a movie trope stretching back to Metropolis that deserves a feminist reading. The author then continues on in a  more-or-less traditional academic mode. Within this genre multimedia elements such as video and music tend to be simply representative of what the author is discussing.

The Observational

Observational videos rely on the ability to show multiple shots at the same time for a particular rhetorical affect. Exactly what that affect is exactly is described well by Jordan Schonig. The goal of their observational “video essay is not so much to solve this mystery (that is the mystery of the follow shot in two films both titled Elephant) but to dwell within it.” The observational video like the essayic video’s goal is analysis, where they differ is their position in the analytic process. The essayic video attempts to answer a question about a phenomena, whereas the observational video offers a new way of looking at a phenomena. As a metaphor, an essayic video is a report from a biology lab, whereas the observational video is a new type of microscope. 

Then there’s Catherine Grant

As I motioned toward in my title, I don’t really get what Catherine Grant is doing. With that said, I like what she’s doing. The video of hers which I will focus on is “Carnal Locomotive.” In “Carnal Locomotive,” Grant overlays quotations by Claude Levi-Strauss and Steven Shaviro over a video from the film Le Jour et l’heure. On top of all this she mixes in an industrial music track. The effect is striking.

What Grant seems to be doing is attuning the viewer to information in a particular way which a reading of the primary texts from which the quotations are drawn does not. Thomas Rickert describes a concept called “ambient attunement” in his book Ambient Rhetoric. Simply put, Rickert argues that the the environs around an actor attune (or even directly constitute) the ontology of that actor. Grant seems to be doing something similar to this. In this remix she brings multiple streams of audio visual information, with the intention of inflecting the viewers understanding of the core information (the quotations).

Grant’s project is exciting. It raises interesting questions about epistemology. Within multimodal texts what ways do the different modes change the epistemological content of the a text? As an experiment my self, I’ve made my own remix of “Carnal Locomotive” which you can see here.

What I hoped to highlight is a way that the video essay allows for a more precise control of the affective response of the the viewer of content than in a traditional academic essay.

What would you say is the most prestigious category at the Oscars? I think it’s fair enough to guess that many – though perhaps not a majority – would say it is the Academy Award for Best Director. There seems to be a sort of allure to the director, to understand them as the key driving force behind a film. Thomas Schatz argues that we need to step back from that understanding of filmmaking (at least in the case of classical Hollywood). For Schatz it is not the director who is the driving force behind a film, but an ecological system wrangled (with varying degrees of success and actual control) by production executives. 

A black and white image of the Hollywood sign

Schatz begins his argument by focusing on film criticism from the 60s and 70s. At this time, Schatz argues, the theory of film history was based on a “notion of directorial authorship” which highlighted “author-artists… whose personal style emerged from a certain antagonism to the studio system at large” (524). This action effectively elevated a sole few directors and movies, those which supposedly transcended the system of their creation and rendered invisible both parts of the career of these auteurs and a vast amount of film history. Such a view is quite myopic, Schatz claims, since the authority to produce auteurist films “came only with commercial success and was won by filmmakers who proved not just that they had talent but that they could work profitably within the system” (524). Considering this, Schatz argues we need to take a more ecological look at the system from which these movies emerged to determine who – if anyone – can be pointed to as the creative center of film in this era.

Ultimately, Schatz argues that more than any particular director, writer, actor, or individual movies from the Hollywood system were the result of:

a melding of institutional forces [where] the style of a writer, director, star, – or even a cinematographer, art director, or costume designer – fused with the studio’s production operations and management structure, its resources and talent pool, its narrative traditions and market strategy. And ultimately, any individual’s style was no more than an inflection on an established studio style. (525)

Schatz demonstrates this point – somewhat convincingly – by examining how several studios tended to treat the narrateme of a late night storm, from noirish (Warner Bros.), to glossy and upbeat (MGM), to the macabre (Universal). However, despite films from the Hollywood system but the ecology of each studio’s system and the technological, economic, and cultural matrices in which the studio and film goers lived, one particular role functions as a sort of lynch pin that keeps the whole ecology in balance and functioning.

Darryl Zanuck, a production executive during the classical Hollywood period.

Production executives, Schatz claims, are this lynch pin. He writes:

these men – and they were always men – translated an annual budget… coordinated the operations of the entire planet, conducted contract negotiations, developed stories and scripts, screened ‘dailies’ as pictures were being shot, and supervised editing until a picture was ready for shipment to New York for release. (526)

For Schatz a film emerged from the studio ecology, but like a watering hole in the Savanna, production executives were the crucial element, both that which kept the ecology going and the place the ecology inevitably orbited. But Schatz is careful not to give too much authorial power to the production executive writing that, “isolating the producer or anyone else as artist or visionary gets us nowhere” (526). To punctuate this argument he quotes Bazin in saying “the American cinema is a classical art… so why not then admire in it what is most admirable – i.e, not only the talent of this or that filmmaker, but the genius of the system” (Bazin qtd. in Schatz 526). So, it is not the director, the actor, the writer, or producer who authors a film within the Hollywood system, though the producer has a particularly powerful function as the central nexus of filmic activity. 

I wonder three things. First, did the Hollywood system truely die in the 1950s? Second, considering the power (cultural and economic) possessed by corporations like Disney, Netflix, and HBO are we seeing a reemergence of a studio system similar to the system of classical Hollywood?  And, as a slightly far more reaching question, with the increasing ability of AI to produce startlingly coherent narratives are we moving into a place where authorship is very literally not the possession of any human agent?